The New Cook at Apple vs. Applidium's Hack of Siri

Applidium, an application development company, has successfully hacked into the Siri servers Apple uses to power the iPhone 4S.

As a developer, that makes for all sorts of possibilities, including a cohesive app that goes to your desktop as well as your Android and other devices.

If Steve Jobs were still alive, I would suspect that the kibosh would be put on this right off the bat. The detectives would be out, the software security would be updated and anything else to keep the walls of the Apple garden high.

But Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple now, and he has already made Apple a kinder, gentler place.

So the question is what will be the response and should there be one?

The Case for Responding.

When Instant Messaging was pretty much a monopoly owned by AOL, there used to be a hacking battle of reaching into the presence servers and enabling third parties to hack into and share presence information. It was petty and very ugly and from the end user’s experience it was a battle by developers who were giving away the product. Keeping multiple IM clients was sad, but it was the only way you could reach everyone.

The Applidium hack into the certificate server could represent another such battle. 

Near term, Apple has to ask itself how it wants to handle this breach point. We could be reading about new security strategies being hacked and Apple becoming a target for the black hat community. We could also see them accept this and enabling the use of Siri as part of the SDK. It depends how they want to play it.

Long term, once again we have seen the certificate server model compromised and it’s clear some rethinking has to be done by the security standards committees.

Next comes the issue of developers having access to Siri itself.

First let me offer a humble opinion on Siri. Siri’s success is in the ability to analyze natural speech and parse the commands from the transcription. Other systems are very good, but the differentiation between speaking and navigating has not been well developed. Siri brings that to the table.

Based on Applidium’s write up, the system is very chatty. It’s possible that there are tales of back end processing that may lead others to improve their systems and take away Siri’s advantage.

Shutting down at the breach point is probably the safest move, but auditing the protocol and seeing if the system inadvertently reveals itself would be a Steve Jobs move.

The Case for Not Responding

If you want the ecosystem to build around Siri, you could think of it as another charging system like the App Store and iTunes. It maybe that moving Siri into the iCloud solution is more profitable than leaving it on the phone.

Ultimately this could be a Telematics play to compete with Sync and OnStar. The old Apple always required their hardware to be the key to accessing their solutions. 

But we have a new Cook in charge now. Let’s see if the recipe changes.